A Turkey for the Philippines? : U.S. Should Look at History and Stifle Its Impulse to Meddle

Official disclaimers aside, Washington has obviously decided to become an active participant in the Philippine electoral process. The release of information last week about President Ferdinand E. Marcos’ disgraceful war record is the best indicator of Washington’s activity. Although laundered, the information was almost certainly provided by official sources.

It is natural for many Americans to hope for the election of the opposition candidate, Corazon C. Aquino. Marcos is a corrupt ruler in failing health, and one alternative to his regime is a nationalist insurgency (both Marcos and the Reagan Administration prefer another adjective, communist ) that would almost certainly force the United States to abandon its military bases in the Philippines. In her most radical statement to date, Aquino has said that, if elected, she will call a referendum to decide the bases’ future. That’s not too radical when you consider the alternative.

If the Philippines is at a turning point, so is Washington: In this election our government must stifle the impulse to meddle. Before we let our enthusiasm for Aquino, our dislike of Marcos or our fear of insurgency lead us even deeper into the morass of Philippine politics, we should review three lessons from our participation in the political processes of other countries in which leaders like Marcos have been forced from power:

Lesson No. 1--Personal dictatorships are not personal at all. Marcos holds power as the representative of a complex structure of power and privilege in the Philippines. He is only the symbol of an old, corrupt order that is destined to be tossed into the ashcan of history. In this the Philippine president resembles Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, the Somoza family in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran.

There are some tough times ahead for the United States in the Philippines. We might now try to switch sides, but the Filipinos can spot blatant opportunism as easily as the rest of us can. They are no more ready to forget our years of support for a brutal dictatorship and a repressive old order than were the Cubans in 1959 or the Nicaraguans and Iranians in 1979.

Lesson No. 2--When the going gets tough, Washington picks a turkey. Only when Marcos goes--and his time is quickly running out, regardless of the outcome next Friday--will the real political battle begin. Significant change is inevitable in the Philippines, and it is not at all certain what direction it will take. Washington, waking up to this a bit late, has begun a desperate scramble to identify and befriend Filipino politicians who will protect U.S. interests. That, in fact, is why we originally befriended Marcos. And that is why we rushed to support the shah in 1954, Batista in 1934 and Somoza in 1933. The trouble, of course, was that our friends were no friends of ordinary Nicaraguans, or Cubans, or Iranians. It is easy to respond that Aquino is no Somoza, and I’m sure that she isn’t. But we didn’t think that Marcos was so bad, either, when we decided that he would be our man in Manila.

For all the attention to Filipinos’ internal politics these days, our government understands the Filipinos about as well as it understood the Cubans in 1958 and the Nicaraguans and Iranians two decades later.

The principal Washington policy-maker on the Philippines is a perfect example of U.S. expertise. Before assuming his present position, Undersecretary of State Michael H. Armacost was the Reagan Administration’s ambassador in Manila. For two years Armacost sent Washington cables that focused not on a crumbling regime but on how to persuade that regime to renew the United States’ lease on its military bases. When the cable traffic touched the topic of political instability, it was blamed on the worldwide recession.

Of course, it was Armacost’s job to see to the protection of American interests, and so he inevitably interpreted domestic politics in the Philippines in that context. Those interests are overwhelmingly related to security concerns; in Southeast Asia we see security as dependent on Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. Philippine politics are not about these bases. Philippine politics are about the distribution of power and privilege among Filipinos.

Washington is now casting about for someone in the Philippines who is both palatable to Filipinos and protective of U.S. interests. Lamentably, these two characteristics probably do not exist today in a single individual. Because Washington’s definition of a good leader is colored so heavily by our security interests, what we want is another Marcos. Filipinos are likely to disagree, for our interests are not on their political agenda.

Lesson No. 3--The turkeys always come home to roost. The day after Chileans elected Salvador Allende in 1970, national security adviser Henry A. Kissinger remarked, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” Three years later Allende was gone, and in 1974 President Gerald R. Ford asserted that the Nixon-Kissinger meddling was “in the best interests of the people of Chile, and certainly in our own best interests.”

When one meddles in another’s affairs, one becomes responsible in part for what happens next. In Chile, Gen. Augusto Pinochet became our responsibility. Now, when the Reagan Administration asks Congress to rescind its ban on arms shipments to the Pinochet dictatorship, or when the assistant secretary of state says that “the democracies of the Western world owe the government of Chile a debt of gratitude for what it did in 1973,” Chileans take a mental note. The Iranians and the Cubans and the Nicaraguans took similar notes, and now we have lost completely the ability to protect our interests in Iran and Cuba, and we have all but hit rock bottom in Nicaragua. The price for meddling in Chile is yet to come.

We undoubtedly will have to take our lumps in the Philippines, too. But we also have an opportunity before us. As Marcos goes, so, too, will our responsibility for the successes and failures of the Philippine government. If, through active diplomacy, we can protect our interests in the Philippines without seeking to dictate the course of Philippine politics, we will have extracted ourselves from the tendency to back the wrong horse and ride it to calamity.

The key is in resisting the temptation to meddle. Stand back and let Marcos fall. Then stay back, and give the Filipinos room to resolve their own problems of political power, to institute their government, as we once did, in such form as to them seems most likely to effect their safety and happiness.